Druidstone has just been updated to version 1.2.0 with major new features: level editor and modding support. With the tools you can build new levels, add new weapons and equipment, create custom monsters and abilities. When you’re ready publish your mod on Steam Workshop. With full Lua scripting support with over 2000 functions, the possibilities are almost endless.

Other resources to get you started:

Tutorial videos
Druidstone Modding WIKI
Steam Workshop

Happy modding!

Build 1.2.0 also fixes some bugs:
– Bug fix: the game may crash when a creature dies while its mind controlled
– Bug fix: Oil Shot does not deal fire damage (also fixed Oil Shot description)
– Bug fix: Dodge + Counter-attack crashes when barehanded

After a long wait, the game is finally out and we’re super excited and proud about it! Please share!

Are you excited about Druidstone? Are you in the market for a beautifully hand-crafted game made by a small team of dedicated professionals, with the kind of turn-based gameplay that is custom-designed to tell your brain to ramp up that dopamine production? Are you a savvy customer who knows a good deal when they see it and wants to save a cool 10% on the purchase price?

Good! Then you should be pleased to know that the release of Druidstone is upon us! More specifically, Druidstone will be released in just three weeks, on May 15th and we are launching pre-orders today! That’s right, if you pre-order now you will get both a Steam key and a DRM-free standalone version with a 10% discount. You will also receive a special pre-order bonus, a free copy of a digital book, featuring concept art, behind-the-scenes information and other material from the making of Druidstone. The book will be delivered to you two weeks after the game’s release on May 31st and will be sold separately at $4.99.

To celebrate the milestone we have also released a new trailer. As we are a tiny team of just four full time developers, we don’t have the luxury of having a marketing team or even just one person dedicated to PR. In fact, all of us are busy polishing the game. That’s why we’re asking for your help. Please consider telling about Druidstone to your friends, families and on the web. We would appreciate it very much!

Having worked super hard on the game for the past weeks, we are proud to announce that Druidstone has hit beta and is well on its way to release this Spring. Before you ask, the beta will be a closed one and we will work with a few chosen betatesters we know. This has worked well in the past and we’d like to continue the tradition. Below is an official press release we just sent out. We’ll blog more about the beta and about recent happenings on the development side later this week.

Until then!

### DRUIDSTONE BETA PRESS RELEASE ###

Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest has reached beta!

ESPOO, FINLAND – APRIL 10, 2019. Indie game developer Ctrl Alt Ninja Ltd., founded by the co-creators of the critically acclaimed Legend of Grimrock games, is proud to announce that their upcoming tactical RPG, Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest is getting close to launch. By reaching beta, the game now includes all game features, enemies and levels present in the final game. “Druidstone is a brand new IP for us and we are excited to see how the fans of Grimrock will react to our take on the turn-based formula,” says Juho Salila (co-founder/artist). “The game is already very near shipping quality and the feedback we get from beta testers will allow us to polish every aspect of the game until everything is perfect and shining,” continues Petri Häkkinen (co-founder/designer-programmer). The beta will be closed, with access given to a carefully selected group of people. Keeping the beta closed allows the developers to personally interact with the testers, and thus get more accurate feedback.

Ctrl Alt Ninja has been working on the game in various forms for four years. The success of the creators’ previous titles provided the team the luxury of trying out different game ideas and working on several prototypes before they decided on Druidstone: the deeply tactical turn-based game of their dreams.

Druidstone, to be released in Spring 2019 for Windows, is a labor of love for its makers, who grew up playing old school computer and tabletop games. A tactical, single-player, turn-based roleplaying game, Druidstone combines the best qualities of modern RPGs with the elegance of tactical boardgames, presented in lush, colorful graphics that make its fantasy world come to life. Every action counts, and careful tactical thinking is a must, as players fight their way through the game’s painstakingly hand-crafted missions, which are as beautiful as they are challenging.

The peace and quiet of Menhir Forest is threatened by a cancerous corruption that spreads through it. Caught in the flow of events are Aava, the missing archdruid’s daughter, who must now shoulder her father’s responsibilities, Leonhard, a Warden of the forest with a mysterious purpose, and Oiko, the failed Red Priest who is living proof that one may be very smart without being particularly wise. Along the way, they meet companions and villains, whose unique personalities and abilities make every encounter memorable.

Get ready to venture forth and uncover the secrets of the Menhir Forest!

This is big! Mikko “Mikki” Rautalahti, a dear friend and a talented writer who has worked on hit games like Alan Wake and Quantum Break, has joined the Druidstone team! With Mikki on board the rest of us can concentrate on game mechanics, levels and balancing, while Mikki is stabbing away at the story, writing missing dialogue lines, filling gaps, and do what is necessary to make the characters and the world really come to life. Mikki and I have a long history and the idea of working together has always been on the back of my mind. Previously other projects and timing has prevented this, but luckily the planets finally aligned… So, without further ado I’ll pass the mike to Mikki and let him introduce himself!

Let me start off by talking a little bit about how we got here. In a lot of ways, this feels like the culmination of a long process: I’ve known Petri for a good long while now — we both worked on Alan Wake together at Remedy, back in the previous decade — but we haven’t actually had a chance to work together directly after those days. When he and the Almost Human gang started working on Grimrock, I was very much into it; it was a lovely union of the classic and the modern, and it was executed with what I thought was exceptional skill and clarity of vision.

We briefly discussed some potential collaboration at that point, but Grimrock really didn’t end up being the kind of game where my services were needed. Over the years since, there have been a bunch of different ideas and concepts. I was still working at Remedy at the time, and their office was right next to Ctrl Alt Ninja’s, so we’d see each other regularly. (Not sure what the difference between Almost Human and Ctrl Alt Ninja is? In practice, the answer is “not much.” It’s mostly just a business thing.)

So every so often, Petri would go, “hey, we have something new we’re working on, wanna come over and see what you think?” And then he’d show me something clever and exciting they’d worked up, and we’d talk about it. The idea of working together on something often came up, but they were in an inconvenient phase with their work, or I was way too busy with something else, and it just didn’t come to pass.

Until now. Now the stars are right, the words of power have been spoken, and a pact has been made, and here I am, just working on Druidstone like it ain’t no thing.

But it is a thing. I’ve been in this racket for a long while, and I’ve been involved in a lot of projects. Some of them I genuinely loved and believed in, others I didn’t; some I worked hard on, but you will never see anything about them, because they didn’t get made for one reason or another. It’s a tough business. For me, Druidstone stands out from that crowd. It’s not a big AAA production, and that means there’s very low latency in decision-making — there’s a small roomful of people, and if they think something is good, that’s it, done, decided. There’s no external validation required, no notes from the IP owner’s marketing department, no brand new executive producer on the publisher side suddenly upending everything because they just got appointed and God forbid they fail to make a splash. There’s just the people in that room, working hard to ship a game they really give a crap about, that they have a personal stake in.

I don’t mean to romanticize indie game making too much. I know making games is never easy; indie, AAA, whatever, creative labor is just super hard, period. But for me, right now, Druidstone’s exactly the sort of thing I want to do. I’m enjoying the immediacy of it. I like the elegance of its design, how the combat works, and I like that it’s also a brightly colored fantasy game. It kind of wears its heart on its sleeve; it’s very sincere about what it is. I like that we can make it funny and cool and weird. I like that it’s not just something people make because you have to do something, and it might as well be this. It’s being made with passion.

That’s something I can get behind.

I am, of course, coming into the project at the tail end of its development. A lot of effort has already gone into building the story; Petri and Janne Sundqvist in particular have been working on it. Still, with all the critical development work being done, it’s fair to say the story track needs some extra love. Somebody really needs to bring it home, make sure all the pieces fit together, take a look at things with a fresh eye, polish it all up. So there’ll be some heavy lifting involved, but I think we’ll end up with something that’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot going on in Menhir Forest, and I look forward to showing you a secret or two.

First of all apologies for the long break since the last blog update. Unfortunately the realities of game development, or really the crunch mode where we have been for the past months, has meant that we had to sacrifice updating the blog in order to concentrate fully on development. Now as we are gearing towards beta and finally the launch, we’d like to get to blogging more often… Well, let’s see how that goes!

Ok, that thing sorted out, let’s talk about today’s subject, which is randomness as a game design concept and how it affects Druidstone. Randomness can be found in many places and in many forms in a game. For example, are levels fixed or randomly generated (tried that, didn’t work for us)? Are combat values such as hit chance, damage, damage reduction and so on random numbers or fixed? Are enemies in levels randomized? What about loot drops and items? Is enemy AI based on random behavior or do they follow strict deterministic rules? Each of these questions can be answered independently, so you end up with a design space with a large number of different combinations, each with their own feel and effect on gameplay.

Continue reading

Oh, boy! What a week! The release of the first trailer video and opening the Steam store page while juggling with press releases and PR has meant that progress on the development front has been quite erratic this week. Nonetheless, these activities are really important, for what’s a good game worth if only a few people know about it? In this time and age, it’s not uncommon for even big games with big publishers to fight for their place in the spotlight, so for small indies like us getting the word through on the right channels is crucial for success.

That’s why we’d like to ask a little help from you. Please consider wishlisting our game in Steam and telling your friends about it. The Steam page also has a full description of the game along with new screenshots.

Continue reading

We are glad to announce that Druidstone has just reached alpha milestone! Alpha in our terminology means that the game can now be played from the beginning to the end and all major features have been implemented. Sure, there are some rough corners and the fat and variety is still missing (more equipment, abilities and the like) but the main campaign is now there. It’s always a special moment to play through a game in development for the first time, and our very own Juho has been fully occupied with that tasks for the past days. Luckily, he encountered only three crashes (which have been fixed already) and a game breaker which caused all equipped items to get lost in the middle of the campaign (oops!).

Next week we are going to regroup, go through the feedback gathered during the alpha test and form a battle plan how to get Druidstone to beta. We suspect the TODO-list is going to be rather hefty, but this is normal and nothing to worry about.

TAGS:from makers based RPG

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